Counting...

The majority of the medications we dispense to our patients are given in standards dosages, so in order to make things easier for the Pharmacy staff and the patients, we pre-bag most of the medicines that we prescribe before they get into the pharmacy, and that’s where I come in. Taking multiple bottles of up to 1000 tablets and separating them into individual bags of 10 or 15 pills is a lot of work, but is very beneficial in the long run.

This tends to be quite a long and tedious process, counting out the pills, individually bagging them along with a small piece of paper with the medicine name and dosing instructions and finally tying the bags and adding them into the inventory. Considering we buy most of our medicines in bulk, there are always plenty of medicines to be bagged. While we have been blessed by several of our short term teams that have helped with this process in the evenings while they are here, a lot of these I take care of myself, as homework. J

Generally, I spend most of my evenings and weekend hours at my house, counting and bagging medicines, trying to keep up with our demand, as well as creating, copying and cutting all of the little instruction papers for the bagging. It’s a lot of work, but has done a lot to increase the speed and accuracy of the pharmacy, as well as helping with the inventory system in general (It’s a lot easier to count bags of pills then to open and count every individual pill in big bottles).

Looking forward towards next year, my hope is that more of our short term teams will be willing to help us out in this fashion. Just one of the many, seemingly little things that groups can do that can make a load of difference here on the field.